The Vatican Rip

CHAPTER 24

The Vatican places great faith—charmingly quaint, really— in the reliability of mankind.

As I say, it takes all sorts. There are the pilot lights at each of the corridor intersections, set high by each of the main doorways.

They indicate the security time clocks where the patrolling guards clock in. No hidden infra-red sensitor beams, unless you include the sets indiscreetly built into the walls near the Viale Vaticano entrance and between the Cappella Sistina and St Peter's itself.

You mustn't know about them because they're secret. And the secret cameras which connect with the screen-outs in the security room which I mentioned can be seen quite clearly from the galleries. They're not quite archaic, but striving hard for obsolescence.

They're about as secret as Mount Palomar. Anna had mapped out the camera blind spots, and I had them by heart. Anna had reported that there were more magic rays to trap unwary burglars at St Anne's Gate. Big deal. That's the trouble with museums.

They're crazy about entrances.

Nervous as a cat, I locked the store-room door with a horrible loud click and walked in silence up the stairs to Signora Faranada's office. There were two risks: a wandering guard, and some unexpectedly simple alarm system like a bell on a door.

The office door came apart at a waggle of my comb. The top filing-cabinet drawer was locked, but they all have that fatal flaw of a spring-loaded catch, and old Joe Bramah showed civilization the way round that in the 1880s, so I hardly paused. The box inside was unlocked, and held the set of master keys the manageress had used earlier in the day. I was worried about the light from my pencil-torch and did all I could to shield it.

The trouble was, I was going into places where windows would be a constant risk. The Vatican has more windows than a mill.

Outside the signora's office a narrow corridor ran about ten yards to end at a door. The fourth key worked. With my hand clutching the rest of the bunch to avoid jingling, I turned the lock. My stupid heart was banging loud enough to wake the dead as I pulled the door open and waited a second for the alarms and sirens to sound off. Dead silence. A brief dizziness swirled in me. God knows how long I'd held my breath.

Unsteadily I clung to the door a moment to recover and had to close my eyes for about a fortnight until the nausea passed.

I stepped out nervously. I knew where I was. To understand the layout of the Vatican Museum you have to think of a huge letter H, except that now with the new wing it has a double crosspiece with the great library between the two struts. From Anna's drawings I was somewhere underneath the Paoline Room and the Biblioteca. One floor up and across, and I would be in my favourite gallery beside my least favourite museum showpiece. To the right and along.

Stairs are the ultimate risk. You can peer down a corridor, count doors, watch for shadows at the far end. But staircases are a swine because you can't see who's having a crafty smoke in cupboardy alcoves beneath.

I reached the top stair on hands and knees. I squirmed flat and squinted at right angles down the long gallery. The ranged series of long rectangular windows, the slanting shadows from the outside lights in the grounds, all there in frozen gloom. And no glow of a cigarette.

Opposite the faint white blobs of the odious stuffed doves the shadows thickened. That would be the blue-and-gold double cupboards, full of stored early Christian figurines.

Happily, ancient cupboards with natty antique locks. They sound and look impregnable, but believe it or not they were my one stroke of luck.

I eeled out into the main chamber a yard or two. Not much light from the Stradone.

Mercifully no curtains at the long gallery's windows, not since that time ten Popes ago when His Holiness had done his nut and the drapery was retired in disgrace, which served them right for mixing maroon and blue. Nothing moved. Better still, it felt right.

Silence everywhere and that precious feeling of loneness. The football was probably midway through the second half by now, maybe twenty minutes before the security round. Yet… there was something wrong. Nothing to stop me, but definitely a wrong vibe somewhere. Still, no time now for imagination.

I got up and practically sprinted back the way I had come, flitting along the camera blind lines, snicking past Signora Faranada's office and through the cafeteria. I reached the store room excited and a little breathless, but it felt good. Really great. Except…

again there was something vaguely wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it. The rip was on. Scramble, Lovejoy, and worry about vibes when celebrating afterwards.

Inside my bag were two slender coils of silk rope. It costs a fortune—at least, it would have if Anna hadn't nicked it. Both were exactly the right length. The longer one stretched double, over and under my great polygonal table top so it lay on my shoulders like a set of clumsy wings. A top loop to put round my forehead. Indian style, leaving my hands free, and my pedestal easily carried by the smaller length of rope slung over my shoulder. Clumsy, but with care not to bump I could do it. My toolbag I looped on my wrist.

Creeping along in the semidark hunched under my tabletop like a tortoise, pausing for breath at corners and manoeuvring my pieces slowly round them, I switched between panic and exasperation. Shuffling along the gallery towards those pale blurs, I was pouring sweat and burning at the unfairness of it all.

It took about ten minutes and seemed a month. Close to, the stupid white birds' glass case was a good landmark. Wheezing with the strain, I lowered the pedestal and then slipped the table top off my back. The relief made my head swim and I had to shift, and fast. My bag of tools.

Looking along the gallery to check, I slid across to the cupboards which stand on the Stradone side of the chamber. There are six double ones, each about six feet wide, though other galleries have as many as twelve. Two minutes to pick the lock and I creaked one cupboard door open.

'Jesus,' I muttered. My pencil torch revealed scores of small terracotta figurines staring back at me. Lovely and nearly priceless, but in the circumstances a real bloody nuisance. Feverishly I began lifting them haphazardly from the middle shelf and stowing them on the other shelves. God knows how long it had taken the curators to arrange them. I thrust them anywhere, scooping their labels up and rammed them towards the back of the lowest shelf. That feeling of sickly confidence had evaporated in my sweat.

Now this whole dig felt bad and that depressing sense of wrongness enveloped me, but I'd no idea why. I began to feel I was being watched from somewhere further down the long silent chamber, which was impossible. I knew that. But I was starting to shake.

Maybe it was all those unnerving terracotta eyes.

My sense of time deserted me. I don't know how long it took to clear the middle shelf, six long feet of valuable early Christian figurines. I'd been quite prepared to saw out any middle divider to give me room to lie down, but the cupboards are without vertical divisions, as sensible cupboards ought to be. I hate those modern coffin shapes they call cupboards nowadays.

By the time I'd cleared the shelf I was close to babbling with fear, feeling invisible avenging angels closing ominously about me. Without looking about, I slid across to that glass-cased monstrosity and lifted it clumsily to the floor. There was a nasty moment when my foot entangled itself in my carrying ropes. I rammed the two lengths into my toolbag out of the way and carried my pedestal over to the cleared shelf. End on and pushed to the shelf's extremity, it still gave me room to lie down— as long as my feet were stuffed down the hollow pedestal's interior.

I made myself stare down the gallery. No sign of movement. My confidence began to creep back when something intruded into my consciousness. In the distance I could hear motor-horns in regular cacophony. For one horrible second they suggested police sirens. My mouth went dry from fright till I recognized it. Dah-dah-dadadadadadada-dah-dah. The universal rhythm of the soccer fan's applause. I turned to jelly. This was it. The televised match from West Germany must be over, and jubilant fans were parading Rome on their way to a celebratory beer-up. Lucky I'd heard the racket, but how long had it been going on? Was that what felt so wrong? No chance of calm now.

My worksheet to protect Arcellano's rent table, then three wobbly goes to lift my phoney antique table top on top. My measurements were too generous if anything. I'd allowed three extra inches, which turned out plenty. A little sliding adjustment of my phoney top, and I could replace that glass case of doves. In a sweat of relief I stepped back. Done. Only an expert would realise that the precious table had widened slightly.

There was no other visible difference. I was supremely confident of my veneer. I'd sold worse to experts.

Lying down on a shelf is harder than it sounds. Why I'd chosen the middle shelf when the lowest one was so much more logical I don't know. I was mad with myself.

Probably some daft idea of peering through the lock to see the security guards pass.

Even that was lunatic, because I'd have needed an eye in my bellybutton. Stupid, stupid. I was in a hell of a state by the time I'd slotted myself along the shelf, breathless and tired. The toolbag fitted in the crook of my knees. I lifted the pedestal up and shoved my feet down inside it. A blue cotton thread from my pocket, wetted and threaded through the keyhole, enabled me to pull the door gently to.

And there I was, safely shelved among the precious early Christian figurines. The important thing now was not to nod off and start snoring. I'd never felt so knackered in my life, but it was going perfectly.

Which raised the important question of why it felt so frigging wrong.

* * *

The security guards came an hour later.

I'd dozed fitfully, jerking awake and imagining a million noises. The cupboard was unbearably stuffy. I'd allowed for a mere fifteen minutes on the shelf. The temptation recurred to open the door briefly for air but I never change a winning team. And by all possible estimates I was undoubtedly winning. I'd made my replica. I'd smuggled it into the Vatican. I'd fiddled myself in. I'd left no traces. Not a fingerprint, not a mark. All I needed now was for the security guards to hurtle past, leaving me five precious uninterrupted minutes to somehow lower the true antique down to the Stradone. Heavy as it was, from there I would simply carry it across to the loading bay steps and conceal it in the store room among the cafeteria tables. I hadn't quite worked this bit out, trusting to Patrizio to pull a switch with the ambulance again, but you can't think of everything. And the security blokes knew their cafeteria table was due to be returned once it was proved contamination-free.

There were two of them, talking in undertones about the big match. Two-one, apparently. A last-minute decider after untold agonies, the opposition as unsportsmanlike as ever. The usual crap.

Luckily they were disagreeing about the team choice, a famous Milan striker having been dropped—unaccountable stupidity or the wisdom of ages, depending on your viewpoint. They passed, muttering arguments. I was worried because their shoes hardly made a sound on the luscious antique flooring, which proves how basically unpleasant these security people actually are. There's no cause for suspicion that bad.

I listened them out of earshot. Anna maintained they went one way first, then retraced the route at the next circuit. We'd argued time and time again over this. I kept telling her it was too good to be true. She called me a cretin. Twice I'd done the entire circuit myself, among tourists. Pausing a full minute at the position of each time-clock and walking at security guard pace, the whole route took forty-six minutes dead. I waited at least that long in the confined space, horizontal and running sweat. Inevitably their meal would come between circuits.

It took longer to climb out of the cupboard than it had getting in. My legs were stiff as hell. Grunting at the effort I had to re-educate my muscles before I could even put my foot down. I practically whined with pain as pins-and-needles tingled up my legs. The feeling had never got that high before.

I lifted my pedestal out, having the wit to recover my blue cotton thread and leaving the cupboard door unlocked in case I suddenly needed to hide. No sign of lurking guards. I was about to start across the gallery to assemble my phoney 'antique' when I froze. I knew what was wrong. In fact, I'd known all along. Only my abject terror had prevented me from appreciating the unpleasant truth.

I slipped across the gallery and reached underneath to touch the wood of the precious piece of Chippendale. Not a single chime of ecstasy. I tried again. And again.

Arcellano's genuine antique table now wasn't.

* * *

Being a divvie's not as easy as it sounds. It's hard work. Okay, so you know without understanding how it is you know. You're absolutely certain that Grandad's old clock is a genuine Jerome, and not a modern copy. You know you are one hundred per cent right, that the rough old timepiece is actually made by that great Yank whose shelf-clocks popularized brass (instead of wooden) movements and whose clocks are now worth a fortune. (Tip: look for Jeromes in East Anglia. It's where genuine examples are commonest found. God knows why.) But all this inner certainty only helps as long as you let it. You can stay an ignoramus, if you're determined. It takes hard work to learn who's making today's best Jerome forgeries, and how many genuine pieces Jerome himself exported from Bristol, Connecticut, to England between 1821 and 1860, and memorize information on his contemporary rivals. You can be an ignorant divvie, and I should know. In that terrible moment nobody was more of an ignoramus than me. I'd been fooled. I'd been sent to nick a bloody dud.

* * *

I felt my face drain of blood. I stood there like a fool, holding my useless bag of tools and licking my lips, looking about for a trillion Vatican Guards to spring out of the shadows and nail me. A frame. A set-up. Hunted. I was hunted. In an instant I was transformed from a clever supercool burglar about to pull off the greatest rip of all time to a nerk who'd been had.

In a sudden panic I began slipping down the gallery towards the marble staircase. And just as abruptly paused. A good steady listen into the dark silence. Nothing. A quick kneel to press an ear to the flooring. Nothing. I sat back on my heels, thinking quickly.

Whether the Museum's 'antique' was valuable or not, I hadn't been rumbled. At least, not yet—and not by the guards. There might still be a score of police waiting outside to nab me, but the fact remained I was still in the Vatican without a single clamouring alarm bell. A memory came—of a day, among crowds of sprinting tourist groups, I'd stood in this very gallery before that 'antique' and been stunned by the clamour and radiance emitted by the loveliest pristine genuine Chippendale I'd ever seen in my life.

Which meant someone else had already done what I'd intended, nicked the genuine item and substituted a dud. In the antiques game we call it 'doing a lady', after the cardgame of dummying queens. For maybe another minute I remained fhere, trying to flog my poor old tired cortex into action.

How long had I got? Say an hour for their break, plus five minutes for starting the reverse circuit. Sixty-five minutes. Take away twenty minutes for shifting the phoney table. Say forty, forty-five at the outside. I managed a swallow. I'd need luck, and every ounce of skill I possessed. I flitted silently back towards those gruesome doves, undoing the toolbag as I went, with cold murder in my heart.